A Poet Sleeping There
by bj
Summary: "Two Cathedrals" post-ep Josh POV. Dramatic introspection alert.


Disclaimer: 'The West Wing' and all related materials belong to Aaron Sorkin, NBC, etc. You know the drill.  
  
A Poet Sleeping There  
By BJ Garrett  
  
The night was young in another hemisphere, and the moon shone nowhere. Fingers chilly, post-tropical storm breeze ruffling his hair, Josh walked the memorial.  
  
It was probably a stupid thing to do. Muggers probably hadn't taken the night off to watch the President tell the truth. Some part of him wanted the quick, random, tactile violence of an attack. To be a victim in an easily describable way. Not like, "Don't worry, Mom, I took one for the President." Or, "Yeah, most of my grandparents' families were a few hundred of that six million."  
  
More like, "I was mugged. It had nothing to do with my job, or my ethnicity. I was there, and it happened."  
  
But CJ would kill him. So he pretended he was invisible. No one would see a lone man tripping out of his prime walking in a deserted park at four in the morning.  
  
He'd left his jacket on the stairs of the State Department Building, feeling impervious to the cold. A hollow thrumming--his heartbeat, the quick, random, tactile part of him said calmly--filled his thoracic cavity. The sound of plastic bags being deflated and inflated--his lungs, that voice assured him--consumed his ears. Lucky.  
  
There is no sense to this. The feelings. Anger, despair, betrayal, pride, love. Above all hovers confusion.  
  
So much lost, so much gained. It all equals out in the end, but the numbers flip themselves over into another column in the account book of the Great Unknown.  
  
He climbed up to the reflecting pool, looked down into the shimmering, still pale image of the monument. Donna said something once about phallic symbols taking over the skyline. He'd told her, grinning, to clean his gun. She pouted and slapped files around for two days until he apologized.  
  
"Donna. About the gun thing, I'm sorry. Where's the Ulster file?" Slap.  
  
The breeze paused, then sighed on. It laughed in the rain and cried in the silence of the night.  
  
Near silence. A siren howled somewhere to the left, then the right, was joined by the varying voices of its cousins, wailing. Mourning some random life lived quickly through the senses. He looked up from the reflection to the real thing, ruminated for a moment on how much more perfect the reflection was, asked himself if that thought was just a metaphor, dismissed the entire night as a metaphor.  
  
A piece of paper snapped onto his shoe, then lay passive on the cement as the breeze stopped for breath again. He bent over and picked it up. It was heavy, expensive, tattered by the wind and other elements of less-important status, driven thin by gravity. Ink was smudged and smeared over it.  
  
With the vague idea of going back to get his coat, he turned around and started walking again. The paper fluttered in his fingers.  
  
Rearing out of the darkness, a light illuminated his face. He stepped back and put a hand up, the paper wiggling in the spotlight.   
  
"Who're you?" a slurred voice asked him.   
  
Just a homeless guy. Sleeping. He woke him. "Sorry."  
  
"O, gentle night of rain-flowering jasmine, you wake me to delights of despair," the man said, put his flashlight on the cement and settled back down. "You curl my toes."  
  
Josh nodded consolingly and started to walk around the bunched-up sleeping bag and flaking styrofoam cooler.  
  
"Wait, and listen. The stars speak to the water, young man," the voice called to him, suddenly rich. "Come. Our crafts are parallel. Wait, and listen."  
  
It made as much sense as his card-playing emotions. He was cold, and he waited, listening. He looked up after a moment, trying to see if the stars were speaking, and he was just deaf with defeat. They glittered like winter stars, instead of trembling like summer ones. The warmth had run from the world.  
  
"Whatcha got there?" His tone was curious, almost wheedling.  
  
Josh lifted his hand, looked at the smooth, once-crumpled paper. It had been run over, he could see the tire marks. "I don't know."  
  
"Give it here," the homeless man suggested, holding out dirty, broken-nailed hands. They were strong, though. They could carry the paper. "Come on."  
  
With a little regret, he handed the scrap over. He wanted to ask if the stars were speaking tonight, or it was actually scheduled for some other night, because he could come back. Nothing better to do, really. But the shadowy man started talking again.  
  
"The sky flew low, and I washed in dirt made muddy by blood. The forest was flame, the trees were like God's fingers on the earth. I was frozen, and moved like lightning by hatred oiling my joints. Quick. Oh, I was angry. The stars spoke there too, but I couldn't hear. The planes wailed in sadness for their lethal work, the 'copters stuttered protests but went willingly. The men mouthed patriotic platitudes and killed each other like fools in competition. Random. We laughed and drank and raped and drank and murdered and smoked. The sky there was very low. If I had not been deafened by my primitive spinal cord, the stars would have whispered like mortars in my ears. Tactile."  
  
He was turning the paper in his hands, flipping it over and running his fingers over it, gripping it solemnly in circles as he told his story.  
  
Putting a hand to his forehead, Josh let a knee go slack and dismissed the whole night as a metaphor. Not caring if the man understood what he was talking about, he poured all his fantastic hopes out. "They didn't listen. It never happened, you know. It was all a mistake. The doctor was wrong. She's been injecting him with a placebo. It's a conspiracy. Sure, he lied, but he's not sick anyhow so it doesn't matter. It equals out, right?"  
  
"Cancels out," the veteran corrected him, shaking the paper at him. "Take it. It doesn't mean anything to me. You're wrong about it all. No mistakes, no metaphors. Deal with it." As Josh reached out for the scrap, he added, "Good paper."  
  
The fibre was slick between his thumb and his palm. "I don't know. I'm not a writer."  
  
Hacking laughter, the rustle of a paper bag over glass, quiet liquid swallowed. "Not a writer. Being a writer...doesn't mean you know your paper. Doesn't mean you know anything. Only us poets know anything."  
  
Them poets, always getting people in trouble. Wait a second. "Us?"  
  
"Haw, yeah." The bag rustled as it was held out to him, or maybe that was his stomach as he contemplated taking a drink.  
  
"No, thanks."  
  
"Fair enough. Want your ears clear to hear the stars, eh?" Two teeth winked at him in a smirk, the bearded jaw sliced open for another swig.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
His feet turned away, took him back up the memorial, the paper held in front of him. The homeless man didn't say anything. He squinted down at it. There were words, he was sure. A snore quaked over the water. The stars had lulled the veteran to sleep. Approaching the monument, he stopped near a floodlight, tilted the paper.  
  
"I've forgotten my jacket again," he read slowly, out loud. His voice echoed hoarsely off the cement. "I walked down the park this morning, and the sunrise burned the dew off the cement. --something-- from the gate, as I was leaving, near the cherry tree where we --something-- that night, I met a poet sleeping there. He was drunk, but he said --something--. Odd, I've never seen a homeless person in the park before. See you soon." A name scrawled like a finger print on the corner of the paper.  
  
Turning sharply at some imagined metaphorical sound, Josh saw that the spot where the poet had slept was empty. His fingers loosened in surprise, and the wind hiccuped, pulling the paper from them. He watched it rise on a sudden updraft and flicker away into the predawn haze over the Beltway. Quick, random, tactile.  
  
He let his eyes bore into the sliver of peach on the horizon--shivering under a mantle of weary grey clouds--for a moment, then started walking again, put his chilly fingers in his pockets, accepted the whole night as a metaphor.  
  
Not believing her luck, Tori Whitfield, fourteen, runaway, grabbed a brown suit jacket off the steps of the State Department Building moments before being picked up for vagrancy.  
  
Quick. Random. Tactile.  
  
The End.  



End file.
